Does your community talk about the flight of youth? The shrinkage and simultaneous aging of communities is a critical issue for rural places. Young people graduate and move away for good jobs or for college and they may not come back for a decade or more, if at all. Recently, a high-achieving, hard-working college student […]

Imagine for a moment that the Montana Legislature is considering legislation that will place additional limits on the production or sale of locally grown meat, including the meat of wild animals. Backing this legislation is the Corporate Grocers Association, which serves the interests of corporate grocery chains across America. The proposed law also places strict […]

Does talk of hiring diversity make you cringe, or does it mean something positive? “Hiring diversity” often takes on highly-charged meanings due to personal experiences, historical events and/or substantial media attention. Fact is, diversity means many things, each of which can strengthen a company – just as the introduction of a foreign substance like reinforcing […]

Recently, a friend posted a simple exercise to help her clients see that no matter where they live, there are lots of people who need what they do even “in our terrible economy”. In summary, her suggestion was: “Next Friday or Saturday, go to the most expensive restaurant in town and get a table (if […]

During Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) November re:Invent conference, there were a number of interesting talks. Psst…Don’t run away, not-interested-in-technology folks, this is barely about tech if you look closely. I got the most out of the sessions centered around the strategic design decisions that Amazon.com (an AWS customer) and other AWS customers were making. These […]

During the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Re:Invent conference‘s “fireside chat” with Jeff Bezos, he told a story about during a professional development session where he (like all senior Amazon management) spent two days on the Amazon customer service call center staff. Stop for just a minute. If your business is small – you likely spend […]

When you talk to your customers about their business, do they ever respond “Wow, I didn’t know that” or “Really?” Does your sales and marketing process provoke your prospects with questions they have to think about? Or does it simply say “Look at us! Look at us!” Far fewer spend their energy and money educating […]

In the last five minutes of this clip from a speaker panel at St. Petersburg College called “Cosmic Quandaries”, noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about the one percent difference in DNA between chimpanzees and people. Of particular interest is his discussion tying the scope of that tiny one percent difference to each species’ capabilities. […]

We talk about a wide array of business topics/suggestions here at Business is Personal. Occasionally, I get emails asking how to get all of these things done in a state of overwhelm. It’s an easy problem to have. You have plenty of ideas and read the things I and others suggest, much less see all […]

What’s coming sooner than you think? Retirement. Don’t run away, 20 and 30-somethings. Even if you’re 22 and three years into your new business, these issues should be on your mind unless you want to do more or less exactly what you’re doing now for the next 30-40 years. We’re talking about the difference between […]

One of the questions I’ve learned to ask clients is “What’s next?” As in, what are you thinking about for next year? (Much less the year after that) It isn’t that what you’re doing today or what you’re launching next month is irrelevant, but it is important that you are already thinking about what you’ll […]

As I was up early to write (as I start most every morning), the reading that primes my writing time started with a piece by @Umairh Haque, who writes for the Harvard Business Journal. It referred to a question Steve Jobs asked John Sculley (at the time, President of Pepsico) when trying to recruit him […]

Several times a month, someone sends me a spammy little message via my Beacon email. It starts off something like this: Hi, I hope you are the right person to discuss about the B2B Lists. We are a leading player in the list vending industry catering to all list requirements from various industry sectors. If […]

Black Friday is behind us. Small Business Saturday is behind us. Cyber Monday is behind us. So now what? While these three events are primarily focused on retail, they expose an underlying weakness that most small businesses need to deal with. Having a PLAN. Maybe this seems obvious. It should, but the last small business […]

One of the more daunting challenges for business owners is figuring out how to deal with a diverse group of leads. What’s a lead? Without over-complicating it, a lead is someone who in some way, shape or form has expressed an interest in buying something you do. I know that isn’t very personal and such, […]